Do any of you get annoyed when you see usability and web design sites with phat PageRank scores of 7, 8 or 9 out of 10 whilst our very best SEO sites are only getting a score of 5 or 6? I do, here are 4 really popular SEO websites that I think deserve higher PR scores:

1/ In my honest opinion SEOmoz.org should have a PageRank score of at least 7/10 on its homepage. There are 156,000 organic links pointing to it and the SEOmoz.org domain has 1.8 million links in total including link from places like the New York Times and the BBC – the kind of links you drool over. SEOmoz haven’t cheated the system, they got those links because they are incredible at what they do, so why are they not getting the PageRank they deserve?

2/ Next up is SEO Book, another website that should have a PageRank 7/10 on its homepage, but it doesn’t because someone at Google thinks we need to be kept in check. The site has a similar link profile to SEOmoz with 176,000 links pointing at its homepage and there are about half a million links pointing to the SEOBook.com domain in total including dream links from places like The Guardian and the Wall Street Journal.

3/ Jim Boykin’s site We Build Pages has attracted organic links from places like Search Engine Land and Labnol.org thanks to it having kick ass articles published on its blog. Plus the free SEO tools that it offers have gained the site loads. The WeBuildPages.com domain has around 32,000 links pointing to its homepage and about 48,000 links in total. Currently the We Build Pages homepage only has a PageRank score of 5/10, the amount of quality links it has should easily make it a 6.

4/ The BigMouthMedia website has been around for years and it has some amazing links from places like Wired and W3 thanks to it having white papers published on it and about 5 years worth of industry news. According to siteexplorer there are about 26,000 links pointing to the BigMouthMedia homepage and there about 38,000 links pointing to the site as a whole. The BigMouthMedia homepage only has a PR score of 5/10.

Stop spanking our PR scores Google!

Posted in SEO News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

I just went to submit one of my client’s to Bruce Stone’s WOW Directory and on the submission page it says this:

“Express Review($1.00 Special) by Paypal (Lifetime Listing)”

WOW Directory is a great looking site and it has a unique category structure that makes it so you get a good few relevant links for your site with a submission, plus you are allowed to put some keywords in your link title, so it’s good for getting a boost on Google.

At the regular price of $43 it’s great value for money, $1 for a link there is just insane. What the hell are you waiting for? Go to WOW Directory and submit now. The offer is only open for today.

Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

Image credit: ContactDubai.com

Back in 2007 I wrote a post about article submission being a poor SEO tactic. Since then the article has had about 5,000 visitors that mainly came from Google and it’s still getting good traffic now. Because it has been so popular I just gave it a bit of an update and added information about how to submit to article directories and which ones to use.

Over the years I have been screwed over in various ways by a few directories such as Article Alley, Articles Base and Isnare, the 1st two added nofollow to my author signature links and Isnare took a payment from me for a featured submission and then never published it or got back to me when I emailed.

Anyway, fortunately there are a handful of decent general article directories that you can rely on, here are my top 4:

1/ Ezine Articles is the best article directory on the web, it has good standards, a PageRank 6/10 and currently, according to Alexa it’s the 185th most popular site on the web. The site is very easy to use, just click onto submit articles and follow instructions to get started.

2/ My 2nd favourite article directory is Buzzle, I have been an author there for over a year now, my articles are usually published within 24 hours and indexed by Google in no time. The site has a PageRank score of 5/10 and it’s Alexa rank is in the top 2,000. You have to apply to get accepted as an author at Buzzle and it can take a few weeks, but IMO it’s worth the wait.

3/ Another great article site is Go Articles, it’s ran by the Jayde Online Network, it has a Google PageRank of 6/10 and its Alexa score is inside the top 3,500. Submitting is a piece of cake, click on submit articles and then fill in the register as a new member form to get started. Articles are published fast, usually in less then a week.

4/ Article Dashboard is a mother of an article directory with, according to siteexplorer nearly 4,000,000 links that have come from other article directories using their script. The site has a Google PageRank score of 4/10 and its Alexa traffic rank is about 5,000. Click on the sign up link in the top right hand corner, follow instructions and start submitting your content.

Make sure you read our article submission blog post before you start using these sites, if done correctly and in moderation article submission can be a good small part of your link building and SEO strategy.

FYI: I think the UK needs a really good article directory so I have just registered OriginalArticles.co.uk and I plan to launch that in the next month or so.

Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

Image: Google search for social media traffic

Last week I was reading an article at Search Engine Roundtable about Google pulling website titles from Google maps and according to a comment on the post Googler, John Mueller has said this:

“We may choose to replace titles which are repeated on a number of pages or which otherwise appear to be suboptimal”

So is this the reason why I am seeing the phrase Social Media Traffic – at the start of my page title tag when I search Google for that particular phrase? I am not too sure.

My actual meta page title tag for the page coming up is this:

“Just How Much Traffic Can You Get From Social Media Websites?”

Google are currently showing this:

“Social Media Traffic – Just How Much Traffic Can You Get From Social Media Websites?

You check the Google cache for the page here and there is no mention of the extra phrase at the start of the page title tag.

Pretty strange right? My thoughts are, if it gets me a higher CTR then I am all for it.

Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

I haven’t really used Chrome that much for work yet, all I have been using it for so far is watching TV shows and movies online – DIVX videos download about 10 times faster then they do with Firefox and IE.

Anyway, I just clicked to view the source code of this blog for some reason and I saw the jazzy colours that Chrome displays when you are viewing source codes. Looking at code is really boring so I think its cool that Google have made it a little easier on the eyes.

Once all of the SEO tools I use are out in Chrome, I may well be making a full switch.

Posted in SEO News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

“digital point forum pr has been reduced”

So I’m guessing this searcher is curious to know why Digital Point Solutions and Digital Point Forums have both had their PageRank scores dramatically reduced:

• www.digitalpoint.com is down from a PR 7/10 to a PR 4/10
• forums.digitalpoint.com is down from a PR 6/10 to a PR 4/10

Here are 3 good reasons why Google might have spanked their PageRank scores.

1. The buying and selling of signature links amongst its users – Buying and selling links that pass PageRank is against the guidelines, this alone could warrant a PR penalty.

2. The link sales forum – Plenty of guideline breaking links get sold in that forum every day, again this could warrant a penalty.

3. DP COOP – The Digital Point Coop link exchange network is still active and spamming Google’s search results to this day.

And that’s just for starters, I’m sure if I looked into it further I could find a few more.

Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

So about two or three weeks ago I was watching Juice I think and I came up with a couple of IMO really good social media yo mama jokes, since then I have been trying to think of 3 more to get my top 5 list and thanks to a bit of help from Mr David Towers I have them, so here goes:

1. Yo mama so stupid that when I told her I was on digg, she asked if I needed a shovel.

2. Yo mama so fat that when I told her I was on delicious, she asked if she could have a bite.

3. Yo mama so clumsy that when I told her I was on Stumbleupon, she said I took a stumble yesterday and grazed my knee.

4. Yo mama so dizzy that when I told her I was on Sphinn, she said I went for a drive this morning.

5. Yo mama so crazy that when I told her I was on Plime, she said I prefer oranges myself.

Posted in Social Media News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

Here is what the Zemanta website says about their product:

“Simple point & click enrichment of your blog posts (and emails). In real-time, while you type. We suggest tags, links, photos, and related articles. You save time and aspirin.

5M+ pictures, 5M+ articles. 10M+ possibilities.”

So the reason I got a free dofollow link on a relevant page is because my Altavista.com article was picked up by the Zemanta system and recognised as a relevant page.

How awesome is that, I haven’t paid Zemanta any money or even registered with them and they are hooking me up with free dofollow backlinks on good quality relevant blogs.

Here are a couple more links from Zemanta that I have found on Google:

• Search: The Human Vs. The Machine
• Youtuber: 15 Must-Follow Comedic Film Actors on Twitter

So to the guys at Zemanta thanks very much for making an awesome product, I bet it is great for bloggers who use it as well, the ones that linked me just got a decent link out of it didn’t they? I reckon other bloggers will as well.

Update: I have just found out that the 3rd blog post I linked to was actually copied from Mashable, I probably should have checked before I linked to it, I remember thinking it was a decent post because it mentioned 4 of the celebrities who I follow and I don’t follow many. I have just placed a nofollow link to that post. I’m not complaining or anything it’s still a free link, but I won’t link out properly to copied content.

Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

End of rant.

Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

The 1st strange thing that I saw was around 3 weeks ago our post that we did about Google maps was ranking ahead of the Google Maps API blog for the phrase Google maps in about 12th position. I stayed there for 2-3 days and then fell down a bunch of pages.

The 2nd strange thing I saw was Search Engine Land ranking on the 1st page of Google.com for the highly competitive term search engine optimization with this post about Google’s search engine optimization presentation. Compared to the other results for that phrase the post had a very small amount of links.

Finally, to top it off the 3rd strange thing that I saw was Shaun Usher’s blog deputy dog ranking on the 1st page of Google.com in the states and Google UK for the phrase porn with this post called ceiling porn. The phrase porn is just unbelievably competitive, many of the pages ranking for that phrase have hundreds of thousands of links pointing at them. In days gone by it would have been impossible to achieve a rank like this with a post that only has less then 1,000 links.

You can see a screenshot of Shaun’s rank on Google.com here. On Friday and Saturday his blog got an extra 2K+ visitors from Google on that phrase alone. The rank fell sometime on Sunday.

So IMO it isn’t just brands that are benefiting from this new algo, SEL might be a brand, but I wouldn’t say deputy dog is and I wouldn’t say this site is. I am not sure how many links the SEL post got but the post on this blog and the one on deputy dog both got a lot of solid blog links in a short space of time so perhaps the algo is just rewarding content that gets a lot of good links fast. In other words maybe anyone can achieve these amazing ranks on Google, it could just be that you need to knock something up that attracts a lot of links, it might be Google’s answer to Yahoo’s Buzz.

Posted in SEO News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.